Of the remaining thirteen novels, two attained only a partial success; and the reason is interesting. These two are The House of Merrilees and Many Junes (1908). The former was written in 1901 but publishers would none of it, and it did not wear a print dress until 1905. Meanwhile the author was trying his hand at short stories, for which his method of work is not particularly fitted, his skill being in the development of character rather than in the manufacture of incident. He did, however, publish a collection of these tales in one volume, called The Terrors, which appeared in 1913, their previous separate publication covering a period of sixteen years. They are amazingly unequal in value; some are excellent, and others trivial. This volume is out of print, and whether any of the contents may be rescued from oblivion is at present problematical. It is interesting, however, that he, at the outset of his career, supposed that invention, rather than observation, was his trump card. The realism of The House of Merrilees is mixed with melodrama and mystery; these are, in the work of a dignified artist, dangerous allies, greater liabilities than assets. In a personal letter he confesses that this artificial plot hampered him; but he goes on to say, "the range of scene and character in that book is something that I have never been able to catch since." He has since—with only one relapse—happily forsaken artificially constructed mysteries for the deepest mystery of all—the human heart. In Many Junes, a story that will be reprinted in America in 1919, we have pictures of English country life of surpassing loveliness; we have an episode as warm and as fleeting as June itself; we have a faithful analysis of the soul of a strange and solitary man, damned from his birth by lack of decision. But the crisis in the tale is brought about by an accident so improbable that the reader refuses to believe it. The moment our author forsakes reality he is lost; it is as necessary for him to keep the truth as it was for Samson to keep his hair. Furthermore, this is the only one of Mr. Marshall's books that has a tragic close—and his art cannot flourish in tragedy, any more than a native of the tropics can live in Lapland. The bleak air of lost illusion and frustrated hope, in which the foremost living novelist, appropriately named, finds his soul's best climate, is not favourable to Archibald Marshall.
The "relapse" mentioned in the preceding paragraph occurred in the year 1912, when he published a long and wildly exciting novel, called The Mystery of Redmarsh Farm. This has all the marks of a "best-seller" and went through several editions in England, though it has not yet been reprinted in America. I regard the writing of this book as the most dangerous moment in Mr. Marshall's career, for its immediate commercial success might easily have tempted him to continue in the same vein, and if he had, he would have sunk to the level of a popular entertainer, and lost his position among British novelists of the past and present. Curiously enough, it came between two of his best works in the Clinton series, The Eldest Son (1911) and The Honour of the Clintons (1913). Maybe the chilling reception given to his finest stories drove him to a cheaper style of composition. Maybe his long second visit to Australia, where he saw and shared experiences quite unlike his English environment, made him try his hand at mystery and crime. In 1911 he had published Sunny Australia, the result of a sojourn on that continent, whither he had gone as special commissioner for the Daily Mail. There is a good deal of superficial cleverness in The Mystery of Redmarsh Farm; its plot is elaborate, with a flavour of Lohengrin; the beautiful lonely maiden's young brother is stolen by a villain and rescued by a young hero who is appropriately named Knightly; a misunderstanding separates the girl and her lover, who sails away to Australia. Unlike Lohengrin, however, he returns, and all is well. There is a conventional detective, and a murder trial and a shipwreck and a recognition scene—I kept looking back to the title page to see if the author really was Archibald Marshall. It is as though Joseph Conrad should write like Marie Corelli. Yet although some of the characters are unreal and the plot artificial and the villain theatrical, the environment, whether in England or in Australia, is as accurately painted as in Mr. Marshall's best stories. He will not write of places that he has not seen. When the gypsies are found, they are found in the New Forest; and any one who reads this yarn immediately after Sunny Australia, will see that these distant scenes are correctly described.
IV
It was in the year 1906, and in the novel Richard Baldock, that he revealed his power. This book, which will make its first American appearance in the autumn of 1918, contains a story so absorbing that it is only in the retrospect that one realizes the vitality of its characters and the delicacy of its art. There are no heroes and no villains. Every person has the taint that we all inherited from Adam, and every person has some reflection of the grace of God. There is no one who does not say something foolish or ill-considered; and there is no one who does not say something wise. In other words there are no types, like "heavies," "juveniles," and "ingenues." As is the case in nearly all the novels by its author, we are constantly revising our opinions of the characters; and we revise them, not because the characters are untrue, but because we learn to know them better. Human nature is consistent only in its inconsistency. It is forever fluid and dynamic; and although no individual has ever understood another, and least of all himself, increasing knowledge helps to make us certain of our uncertainty. No man will play the part his friends have written for him. One reason why Shakespeare was a first-rate and Jonson a second-rate dramatist is because Jonson created humours and Shakespeare created individuals. Among all Shakespeare's personages, Hamlet is the most interesting to readers and the most baffling to commentators; because the latter try to adjust him to a theory of madness, weak will, or what not. Is not the fact that he has never been understood by any one and never will be, the strongest proof of his reality? Some think he lacked backbone; others insist he was all backbone; some think he was mad; others that he only pretended to be mad; while America's greatest Shakespearean scholar said he was neither mad nor pretended to be. A young gentleman of Hamlet's copious temperament, placed as he was amid natural and supernatural forces, might easily at times seem to illustrate any one of the above appraisals. Indeed I suppose the sanest and most resolute among us seem at times to lack either resolution or sanity or both.
The more complex a character, the less dependable he is. And everybody has some complexity. Even quiet Horatio, beloved of Hamlet for his steady self-control, tried to commit suicide.
Every fine novel and every fine drama must of course illustrate the law of causation—the principle of sufficient reason. But characters that run in grooves are not human. In Richard Baldock, we have, as we so often have in the work of Archibald Marshall, strife between father and son—a kind of civil war. This war, like many others, is begotten of misunderstanding. There is not only the inevitable divergence between the older and the younger generation, there is the divergence between two powerful individualities. We at first sympathize wholly with the son. We say to ourselves that if any man is foolish enough to sacrifice all his joy in life to a narrow creed, why, after all, that is his affair; it is only when he attempts to impose this cheerless and barren austerity on others, that we raise the flag of revolt. At the deathbed of the young mother, one of the most memorable scenes in our author's books, we are quite certain that we shall never forgive the inflexible bigot; this hatred for him is nourished when he attempts to crush the son as he did crush his wife. Yet, as the story develops, and we see more deeply into the hearts of all the characters, we understand how the chasm between father and son is finally crossed. It is crossed by the only durable bridge in the world—the bridge of love, which beareth all things.
Tolerance—when based not on indifference, but on sympathy—is tolerant even of intolerance.